Homeostasis, Interrupted: Living with and Recovering from a Stigmatized Identity

Abstract

There is much to admire about Sedikides’ (this issue) homeostatic model of identity maintenance. In brief, Sedikides argues that people possess a psychological immune system that helps them to maintain psychological homeostasis; “a routine, adaptive, process by which people monitor their internal and external environments for threats to their selfviews or, more generally, to their theories about their characteristics, relationships, and circumstances” (p. 215). The scope and complexity of the model effectively incorporate theories and empirical findings from the sprawling literature about the self, and thus provides an overarching structure apt to organize the field. The model’s focus on mind-body connections is also a welcome return to a holistic self-psychology that seemed lost for a while, but whose resurgence in recent years raises new questions and offers new opportunities for interdisciplinary cross-pollination. Framing the mechanisms that uphold a coherent sense of self as an immune system further emphasizes the inherently intertwined biological and psychological components of human life. Yet despite all of these strengths and the importance of the model as a whole, if we are being totally honest—and that seems to be the goal here—we suspect that some people could feel alienated when reading this paper. We agree that most people must contend with daily feedback that refutes their generally-positive self-views, including negative feedback from an employer, poor performance on a task for which they believe they are highly skilled, and criticism by a friend—all examples that Sedikides uses to illustrate his model—and we agree that those kinds of experiences can be highly distressing. Yet, when some people read those examples, a tiny voice in their heads may whisper, “That must be nice!” It must be nice to live in a social world where identity-threats can be easily countered if one “construe[s] their experiences optimistically” or “recall[s] selectively favorable information” (Sedikides, this issue, p. 211). It must be nice to enjoy positive self-views that meet “... survival and reproductive needs, including physical and social attractiveness, intellectual prowess, self-regulatory proficiency, and social status” (Sedikides, this issue, p. 197). It must be nice to have a psychological system whose primary goal is to simply feel good. Unfortunately, for people who possess one or more intersecting identities that are subject to social devaluation, or stigma, this is not always their lived reality, and we think that this perspective is missing from Sedikides’ model. This oversight is epistemologically costly, because from a population demographic perspective, most people possess characteristics or belong to groups that are subjected to stigma, and most of them belong to multiple stigmatized groups (Pachankis et al., 2018; Reinka, Pan-Weisz, Lawner, & Quinn, 2020). The proportion of the population that is disabled, fat, queer, or who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color living in postcolonial/settler societies like the US and Canada—to name just a few possible intersecting and stigmatized identities—far outnumbers the proportion of the population who belong to none of these groups, even in societies where each group is a “minority” on its own. Indeed, this is how hegemonic social systems that foster stigma are designed to operate: the few dominate the many, and part of that domination includes overlooking and excluding “non-normative” lived experiences (e.g., Bos, Pryor, Reeder, & Stutterheim, 2013). We would like to take this opportunity, then, to explore how Sedikides’ (this issue) impressive, thorough, and compelling homeostatic model of identity maintenance could be expanded to explain the experiences of people who not only must struggle to survive in social environments that would rather they did not exist, but must also struggle to live with and recover from the psychological consequences of that trauma. Thus, in the discussion that follows, we explore how Sedikides’ model can be expanded to explain the experiences of people who must live with, and hopefully one day recover from, social stigma.